What’s plain is this: now that the federal government has given the go-ahead, environmental concerns have taken a back seat. The decision on whether or not Australia will be home to one of the world’s largest coal mines is purely financial.

This week the Federal government approved what is expected to be Australia’s largest coal mining effort. The Carmichael Coal Project will cover over 200 square kilometres, cost $16.5 billion, excavate six open cut mines and five underground ones, and drain an average of 10 billion litres of water from the Galilee Basin annually over 60 years of operation.

Environmentalists are supremely pissed. The proposed project would see 450 more ships per year entering the already feared for Great Barrier Reef. If this mine, the Alpha Coal project, and the five other projects on the Galilee Basin awaiting approval, all go ahead—it would mean that by 2020, the total number of ships on the reef each year would blow out to 7,000.

There are also concerns about the environmental impact on the reef caused by dredging, the impact hundreds of kilometres of rail work and mining sites will have on local biodiversity, the impact of using so much groundwater from the basin, as well as the effect the mine could have on agriculture. On a more global scale, as The Conversation publicised, Victoria University Climate Expert Professor Jones has said if all coal mines under consideration for the Galilee Basin were operating, they would exceed 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

To top it all off the Indian company heading the Carmichael Project, The Adani Group, has a history of non-compliance with regulations and environmental destruction. This has been recorded by Greenpeace, and been used by them and Getup! to discourage international banks, such as Barclays and Deutsche Bank, from financing aspects of the project.